In contemporary operating systems, data transfers to a computer system via TCP/IP typically require processing within the system's OS kernel's networking stack, which requires involvement of the system's CPU, of course. Consequently, higher speed transfers in modern high-speed Ethernet technology tend to increase load on the CPU, particularly for servers handling bulk traffic such as storage servers. For this and other reasons, the networking industry and its Internet Engineering Task Force defined alternative OSI transport layer features for remote direct memory addressing (“RDMA”), including InfiniBand and iWARP.
Traditionally, various types of communication fabrics such as TCP, RDMA, Fibre Channel and others, have each had their own dedicated devices and switches.